Quote:She lost because she is a garbage candidate. Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves for this.

Considering the lack of any sort of a bench downstream for democrats, they're in a complete state of panic.  When your best next prospects are Elizabeth Fauxahontas Warren and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are either older than, or around the same age as Hillary, the party is in trouble. 

 

Reading some of the articles that have popped up about internal conversations the party is having, the grassroots people are ticked because the old guard democrats like Pelosi and Reid have held on to power for so long and refused to let the younger rising stars step up that their bench has been completely decimated.  They hold 13 governor's seats, and lost even more state houses in the election this past week.  They're blaming a lot of this on Debbie Wasserman Schultz for allowing Obama to suck all of the oxygen out of the party steamrolling any potential heirs to his presidency. 

 

From the sounds of it, this could be a long-term situation because they've absolutely obliterated what would normally be considered the farm system for the national party with the state level politics. 

 

It's interesting because prior to the election, you never would have suspected that to be the case based on the rhetoric, but democrats have been losing down ticket for several election cycles, and there really doesn't appear to be any momentum to turn that around at the moment, forcing the party to seek out new leadership and to push even further to the left in order to try to regain some footing.  Everyone though Trump would wreak havoc on the GOP down ballot, and that turned out not to be the case, and in fact, he actually showed pretty well in having coattails to win many close elections.  The republicans who lost Senate races this week actually turned their back on Trump.  Those who didn't, won. 

 

Both parties are going to have to reinvent themselves to some extent.  One more than the other.  I think the establishment in  both parties has done a great disservice to the electorate, and they're now feeling the wrath of turning their back on voters in favor of consolidating their own power.

 

As far as why Clinton lost, the post mortems are rolling out now, and she's blaming Comey.  I think she's giving him far too much credit, although I do think his announcement that the investigation was reopened didn't help her, it more or less solidified the opinion of those who didn't trust her to begin with.  That includes suburban women, who she took for granted as a locked up bloc of voters in her column.  They swung big time to Trump when the dust settled.

 

Where Clinton should be looking to explain why she lost the election is to look at the swing states that she expected to carry, like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.  They expected to win those states in a walk, so she didn't put much in the way of resources into those areas until the weekend before the election when they were getting some indication of trouble.  Trump flipped counties in those states that went 3 to 1 to Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he actually went there and talked about jobs in what's more or less the rust belt.  It resonated, and he won those areas of the states handily. 

 

Even in Virginia, they were in a complete state of panic because it took so long to call it.  The northern part of the state is heavily democrat with a consolidation of federal employees around DC.  They expected to win VA by 10 points, but it was so close that the delayed call actually hurt them elsewhere, and that was the first sign of trouble for the campaign. 

 

I read that when the election results started rolling in from Wisconsin, and it was confirmed that Johnson wasn't going to get booted from the Senate by Feingold, that was when they knew it was over, and they started preparing the staff for a concession.  Trump hadn't even won the state yet, but their internal polling told them he would, and that he'd pick up Michigan and PA as well, which ultimately happened.  They knew they'd have a battle in FL, but when it was called for Trump, they saw it as him winning a state that he absolutely needed, but she didn't.  When he took NC, that was a devastating blow.

 

In the end, when the analysis is complete on this election, it was Hillary's hubris, distrust, and a complete lack of likeability that cost her the election.  The key demographic groups she expected to carry her to the White House just didn't show up because they didn't like her. 

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